Should newspaper business-section articles about tobacco companies ritually include statements such as "The company’s profits and future existence, of course, wholly depend on its ability to externalize the health effects of its products"? Probably not. The newspaper article is a genre narrowly focused on one item -- indeed, perhaps even why newspaper articles are sometimes called "items." So, reader consciousness that tobacco companies profit by creating work for the health care industry must come from elsewhere, like the health section, or the Ad Council.

Looking down the wrong end of a barrel (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

For the last couple of days I have been chewing over this short Financial Times article about the global economic quandary created by high oil prices. The item is informative. The rub is that oil-producing nations tend to save money rather than invest it. When oil-consuming nations send their petrodollars abroad, the capital essentially disappears from the market, and global demand falls, potentially slowing the world economy. The solution to this problem -- massive investment -- creates another one: How should producers invest money from super-high oil prices? That’s interesting. That’s not what drives me nuts.

This drives me nuts: To illustrate just how expensive oil is, the writer and/or the editors wrote this lede: "At today’s prices the value of oil in the ground exceeds the combined value of all the world’s equity and debt markets."

In fairness, the FT is not expecting anyone to rip this statement from context and unpack it. But here goes. Energy reporters, energy economists, energy-industry players -- really anybody with the word energy in their job description -- may be looking backwards at this point rather than forwards. We think about oil as energy, the heart of the energy industry, but to get slightly technical, it’s not energy. Oil is matter. And when we burn it, this matter releases energy it stores. Oil's combustion products are matter. Hydrocarbons reconfigure themselves into carbon dioxide and water and pollutants. And this matter, famously, joins the atmosphere and retains thermal energy trying to radiate out from the planet of the apes.

So, at this stage of the game, to even insinuate that all of the oil in the ground has value as something useful, or that it is just "energy," rather than matter in destructive quantities, is at least as misleading as talking about the macroeconomic value (or cost) of tobacco companies, without taking into account cancer and heart-disease impacts of its products. Certainly, it’s a gob-smacking factoid that the hypothetical value of oil reserves, at current prices and estimates, matches that of all equity and debt markets. But not as gob-smacking as the implications of thinking we can burn all that oil and continue to externalize the costs to future generations.

Man, that drives me nuts!

The Giant's Shoulders is a monthly blog carnival devoted to classic scientific papers. Sitting in boxes downstairs in the basement are a fair number that might qualify, raw material for the book. It's moments like this that I'd like to take advantage of to tell some of the great stories and introduce some of the memorable personalities from my Carbon Age research, but who didn't make it into the book, or whose material was cut short.

Edwin Salpeter is a Cornell astrophysicist, who in the early 1950s first posited how carbon might be created in stars. How stars released energy, and built heavier atomic nuclei in the process through nuclear fusion, was a major battleground in the war of the day over the origin of the Universe. The Big Bang eventually prevailed over the so-called Steady State hypothesis, which put forth that the Universe has always existed; galaxies fly away from each other because new matter is always being regenerated in the center of things. Here's the split: The Big Bang team wanted to show that all of the elements were created in the expansion of the Universe at the beginning of time. The Steady-Staters needed to show that stars produce the elements. Salpeter belonged to the latter camp.


Edwin Salpeter

Salpeter's story might be that of the giant standing on his shoulders. Fred Hoyle, the cantankerous genius and eventual lunatic, is one of the 20th century's greatest gifts to science historians. Perhaps his most celebrated insight occurred in 1953, when he saw a major breakthrough hiding in an observation Salpeter had made in a paper some months earlier.

The Salpeter paradox is this: If Fred Hoyle was the genius who figured out how stars make carbon, why is that process called the "Salpeter" or "Triple-alpha process"? Answer to follow.

Salpeter's story is something of a nail-biter. As an Austrian teenager, he was pulled from public school and shuttled off to a segregated facility for Jewish students shortly after Hitler annexed Austria. That lasted until official-looking men began showing up at school inquiring about him. Things were getting scary. Salpeter’s father sold their house in Vienna to a Nazi party member who worked as a hotel porter. The two ended up living in hiding in the hotel for several months until they could safely exit the country. “He was a rather nice Nazi,” Salpeter recalled, speaking honestly no doubt, but infused with irony and a dry wit. “There were some nice Nazis. He let my father and me stay in his hotel.”

Otherwise a dutifully oblivious teenager, Salpeter was forced by circumstance into a mature contemplation of mortality that only war can provide. “It was curious that during my hiding period, when I assessed that my probability of surviving to adulthood was small, I started thinking seriously what I might do if I became an adult after all,” he wrote in a 2002 autobiographical essay. “Sons of professional sword swallowers often become sword swallowers, and my father was a physicist.” In an interview he added: “I think I would have enjoyed being an anthropologist or an opera singer more than a scientist, but I had no talent.” After three months living in the hotel, the family acquired exit papers and, denied refugee status in the United States, left for a new home in Australia, where he earned his doctorate, eventually landing a post-doc at Cornell University.  There he worked with Hans Bethe, the first scientist to crack the basics of energy production in stars.

In 1951, Salpeter spent a summer at Caltech, working with Willy Fowler, the amiable head of the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory. Fowler handed off some unprocessed 1949 nuclear physics experimental data to Salpeter to see if he could solve a tough problem: Physicsts couldn't figure out how stars make carbon.

Salpeter saw that two helium-4 nuclei burn into a beryllium-8 nucleus and stick around for a scant 9.68 femtoseconds each. He calculated that that span is long enough that one Be-8 nucleus should always exist for every 10 billion or so other particles. And that's enough for a third helium-4 to seek out beryllium-8 and fuse into a carbon-12 nucleus. Stars hotter and denser than the sun generate heat and radiation this way. Conceiving a carbon nucleus with three alpha particles became known as the "triple-alpha process" or "Salpeter processs." Salpeter eventually published his results in an annual journal:



Fred Hoyle recognized that Salpeter's analysis in this work was incomplete. He pounced. If Salpeter's scenario were accurate, Hoyle supposed, stars would not produce enough carbon to match known cosmic abundances. Without known carbon abundances, human life—Fred Hoyle's life in particular—could not exist. Salpeter wrote:

I calculated the rate for this indirect conversion of helium into carbon... in the summer of 1951 and published it in the following year. I noted in that paper that my calculated rate could easily be too low by a factor of 1000, say... but I did not have the chutzpah (or guts) to do anything about it: My energy production rate for red giant stars required a central temperature that was within the rather uncertain range given by stellar evolution theory at the time; my calculation would lead to most of the helium being converted to oxygen and neon instead of carbon, but I just did not have the guts to think of resonance levels that had not been found yet! A short while later Fred Hoyle demonstrated both chutzpah and insight... to show that there JUST HAD to be an appropriate resonance level in C[arbon], and he was able to predict its energy. Willy Fowler and his colleagues soon looked for Hoyle’s predicted resonance level and found it just where it should be.

Joanne Collings of the DC Examiner conducted an interview with me recently about how The Carbon Age came together:

Eric Roston was a journalist for TIME until he left to devote all his time to The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become (Walker &  Co., July 2008).  He is now senior associate in the Washington office of the Nicholas Institute.   

Q: You’ve said that science had not been a “strong point” of yours until you started work on this book. 

A: I’m an accidental science writer. I covered mostly business and technology at Time, focusing on energy and climate. After a while, I started asking myself how I would make sense of everything I’m covering. Second, I (found) I use(d) the word carbon more and  more and a lot of other people do too, but I (didn’t) have a strong sense of what it is other than . . . the central structural element of all life and civilization.  

There were two important trends that I found: One is the national conversation about science education and science literacy (and the) climate change. It became clear that the fastest way to learn the most about (what) world we live in and who we are is really just by focusing on the carbon atom and what it is, how it does that crazy thing it does, and how it gets around.

Q: How did you get up to speed on the science?

A: Over three or four years, I read thousands and thousands of articles, scientific books and college textbooks; I wanted to focus on primary documents. I didn’t want anyone else’s filter. It was more work than I ever dreamed it was even possible to do, and I'm someone who's always enjoyed working.  When I didn’t understand a journal article, I would call the author.  Everyone I ever contacted about the idea of this book was immediately supportive.   

Q: How you did you make the book accessible to non-scientists?

A: I was the audience I was writing for. I wanted to make this accessible to myself. By satisfying my own questions, (I hope to satisfy) a lot of other people’s. This is a personal book in the way “I” is a personal pronoun.

“I” is the word I use to talk about myself, but it’s also the one everyone else uses. It’s this universal personal word. I hoped I would be hitting some universal personal questions. 

Q: Kirkus Reviews said the book is “lucid and occasionally disturbing.”  Was “disturbing” deliberate?

A: I wouldn’t say I worked to make it disturbing because it is disturbing. I try not to be an alarmist. There’s a galaxy between alarming and alarmist.   

Q: “Delightful” turned up in more than one review.

A: I was delighted. I wanted to write a book that would be enjoyable. I tell friends I don’t know what’s crazier: How much work this book took or the fact that I loved just about every second of it. So when a reviewer says it was delightful, it was, and I hope people find delight in it.

Rush Limbaugh used a quotation of mine in TIME magazine to express his abiding affection for petro-terrorism.



The story begins rather innocently, with writer Amanda Ripley punctuating her introduction with this quotation:

"But it's also true that Americans are finding options where there seemed to be none. They're ready to change — and waiting for their infrastructure to catch up. They are driving to commuter-rail lines only to find there are no parking spots left. They are running fewer errands and dumping their SUVs. Public-transit use is at a 50-year high. Gas purchases are down 2% to 3%. And all those changes bring secondary, hard-earned benefits.

"'You suddenly are reminded how the economy works,' says Eric Roston, author of a new book about energy, The Carbon Age. 'Nobody wants high prices for oil. But there's also no faster mechanism to change behavior.' The suffering will go on. But the story, like any good tragedy, is not without redemption."

"Now, here, in the final paragraph, is the real reason for writing this story. "Eric Roston, author of a new book about energy, The Carbon Age, says, 'You suddenly are reminded how the economy works. Nobody wants high prices for oil. But there's also no faster mechanism to change behavior.' The suffering will go on. But the story, like any good tragedy, is not without redemption." This is TIME Magazine, Amanda Ripley. And so what's the great thing about gas prices going up? You pigs will change your behavior. You unrepentant energy pigs will change your behavior, and you'll get on the rotten, unreliable mass transit, if you have any. Otherwise you'll find a job where you can ride your bicycle to like these brilliant Europeans. But you are an unrepentant energy pig, and it's about time your behavior changed, and thank God for four-dollar gasoline to do that.

So here we have the arrogance and the elitism and the snobbery of the Drive-By Media and their noted experts in a short little piece, "10 Things You Can Like About $4 Gas," and it's all predicated on the fact that you are pig, that you are guilty, that you deserve to suffer, but there is redemption. And so we're happy for high prices in energy 'cause you are going to change your behavior, 'cause you are destroying the planet, you are greedy, you are this, you are that. Hello global warming. This is a microcosm. The same kind of arrogant, snob effetes want to tell you how to live 'cause you're too stupid to know how to live right. And when you are too stupid, and don't live the way they want you to live, then you embarrass them in the eyes of the Europeans. And our elite, effete-snob Drive-By Media leftists and other leftists do not want to be embarrassed in the eyes of the Europeans! So you, you worthless shreds of human debris, we're going to change your behavior -- because you're too stupid to live in a way that won't embarrass the elites."